Duck Pasta Sauce

This weekend, I found myself in a grocery store on Saturday at 19:15, meaning that I had 45 minutes to come up with what was for dinner on Sunday and buy the ingredients, because in Bavaria, grocery stores are closed on Sundays. This is, to use a German expression, doof. Naturally, I was a wee bit stressed about this; one does want to eat well on Sundays, but I had neither time nor really any clue as to what ingredients I had at home.

Luckily, I had just spent a couple of evenings doing an archive binge of FXcuisine.com, a really great food blog with loads of instructive pictures and a lot of delicious-looking Italian slow food. My thoughts immediately went to his Pasta con l'anatra, a pasta sauce made using a whole duck. I didn't remember the ingredients exactly, so I just grabbed a duck and a carrot and hoped that I'd have the rest at home.


As it turns out, I didn't quite, but it still turned out a fully delicious meal, even though served on dried pasta instead of the home made stuff, and without a couple of aromatic ingredients. Both me and Angelica enjoyed this dish very much, and we will certainly try it again. Check out the recipe at FXcuisine.com, and be sure to check out the rest of the site as well.

As to our divergence from the recipe, we didn't have any celery or guanciale (nor any other smoked pig product, such as bacon), no laurel and no parsley, meaning that we actually lacked most of the aromatic ingredients involved. We also didn't have a pan large enough to fit a whole duck (ours weighed in at 2,5 kg and served about 3), so we divided it into breasts, legs and wings. It was still very good indeed.